For most participants it was a first-time visit, for a few a return visit and for one, his second home!
Seventeen members had the privilege of being conducted by Dr Lisa Kirkendale, Curator (Mollusca), on a guided tour through the wet and dry storage areas, laboratories and the Preparators’ workshop at the WA Museum’s Collection and Research Centre in Welshpool.
Our excursion started in the impressive new Harry Butler Research Centre. This facility has been custom-built and installed with approximately ten kilometres of shelving to house some 2.5 million specimens. The Austrian-built stainless steel compactus system not only holds multiple jars of each taxonomically arranged species, the lockable ends of each unit hold extremely valuable type and/or holotype specimens.
Wet specimens are now stored in 70-100% ethanol rather than the previously used methanol.
We then moved onto the dry laboratories where the specimens are examined, identified and catalogued. The museum has a state-of-the-art Molecular Laboratory where genetic studies are conducted.At our October meeting we were invited by our speaker, Kirsten Tullis (WAM’s Senior Preparator), to visit her workshop. Here, we were again shown how birds are prepared for mounting and models are made. The latter included Kirsten’s unique method of progressively reducing the size of a model by making a sequence of silicone rubber moulds of dental alginate casts. The alginate, used by dentists to make impressions inside the mouth, has a high water content and shrinks as it dries.
As we were led through to the dry storage area we spotted many items which previously had been displayed at the WA Museum’s Perth site, which is temporarily closed for redevelopment. Some people were fascinated by meteorites, some by old cars, others by toys—but everyone homed in on the old wood-and-glass cabinets from the Mammal Gallery with their rather stiff-looking stuffed animals.
We ended our visit in the Aquatic Zoology dry collection, which is one of the largest collections of marine animals in the Indian Ocean region. The molluscan dry collection alone contains over 300,000 lots with millions of individual specimens. And one reference we couldn’t miss was a copy of The Western Australian Naturalist sitting on someone’s desk.
And the GOLLY moment? For me it was seeing the body of the cephalopod, Spirula spirula. While I was very familiar with its internal buoyancy chamber—the Ram’s Horn Shell we commonly find on the beach—the animal itself was completely unknown to me until Don Howe asked Lisa to show us the preserved specimens they looked like a tiny squid, but only a few centimetres in length. Golly, I had no idea the shell belonged to an animal that looked like that! (And I learnt even more wondrous facts when I looked up relevant websites when I got home.)
Don Poynton
